Computing systems such as mobile devices, notebook computers and tablet computers running operating systems such as, for example, an ANDROID (Open Handset Alliance), IOS (APPLE, Inc.), LINUX (Linux Foundation), or WINDOWS (MICROSOFT Corp.) operating system may use fixed (e.g., vendor/factory set) CVM settings size. For example, a typical mobile device might have a CVM settings size that is fixed at 200 MB, 300 MB or 400 MB, with a swappiness (e.g., LINUX kernel parameter) from 60 to 100 that may control the degree to which the system swaps memory pages to/from memory and/or CVM to/from a swap space on a secondary memory storage such as flash memory, hard drive. In conventional systems, the overhead (e.g., resource utilization) of moving data into and out of CVM may increase when the amount of available system memory is relatively low, even though there may be sufficient work being done by the system in the background to maintain free memory by stopping (e.g., “killing”) processes and services. Indeed, while running applications with heavy resource usage (e.g., central processing unit/CPU and/or memory) in foreground memory, a system may appear to almost crawl to a halt while attempting to free up memory. Moreover, having CVM activities run in the background may further degrade system performance, because one or more applications destined to be stopped that happen to reside in CVM may need to be uncompressed prior to being stopped, while other applications may need to be compressed and then pushed into CVM to free up memory for foreground applications.